Ana Caraiani works at the interface between the so-called Langlands program and arithmetic geometry. She is awarded the New Horizon in Mathematics Prize for diverse transformative contributions to the Langlands program, and in particular for work with Peter Scholze on the Hodge-Tate period map for Shimura varieties and its applications.
Since a the beginning of September she holds a Hausdorff Chair at the Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM). The 37-year-old Romanian is the first woman to hold this position. “Bonn is one of the best places in the world to work on arithmetic geometry”, she says. Ana Caraiani already had a close connection to Bonn: In 2016, she became a Bonn Junior Fellow and, after her appointment at Imperial College London, was associated with the Hausdorff Center as a Bonn Research Fellow until recently. In 2018, she was one of the winners of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society, and in 2020 she won the EMS Prize.
HCM member Vera Traub receives the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for advances in approximation results in classical combinatorial optimization problems, including the traveling salesman problem and network design. She was also recently appointed to the University of Bonn, as an junior professor at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics.
Like Ana Caraiani, Vera Traub has a long-standing relationship with the University of Bonn: she completed her dissertation in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jens Vygen at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics and received prestigious awards for it. In her PhD thesis, Vera Traub made important breakthroughs on open questions of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Subsequently, she achieved fundamental advances in network design. The TSP and network design are among the most prominent problems in combinatorial optimization.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation Awards
Once a year, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awards top-level prizes in various scientific disciplines. The top prize, the Breakthrough Prize, is one of the world's largest science awards and includes up to five prizes each year for significant contributions in physics, life sciences and mathematics. The prizes are each endowed with three million dollars. In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes, up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes, and up to three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes are awarded each year to early-career researchers. Founders of the Breakthrough Prizes are Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. They finance the prizes through their foundations.
